Strawberry Fields Forever is the title of a song composed by John Lennon, published by the Beatles in 1967 together with Penny Lane and which, in 2021, was proposed by Rolling Stone magazine as the seventh best song of all time. It is a song in which strongly echoes, with the memory of a “strawberry field”, the theme of nostalgia for childhood, the one in which many of us, after the long winter months of apples, oranges and mandarins, waited enthusiastically strawberries with their sweet and delicious flavor. Those were the times when strawberries could only be tasted starting from May even if, after a while, they ended inexorably without any possibility of finding any more. Because then, like cherries, strawberries also ripened only once a year, just when school was about to end, the days, with their long sunny afternoons, were a prelude to summer and holidays … and then those fruits did not even exist. they had to peel. Practically an overflowing mixture of beautiful combinations for those who, at that time, could happily be satisfied with those. Today, strawberries are available all year round. They are no longer, with their seasonal uniqueness, the magical timepiece of the good weather that begins and, sometimes, it seems that even their flavor has been affected. But it is possible that on this last aspect, more than reason, it is sentiment and memory that make the difference. Carl Nilsson Linnaeus, a leading figure in the Natural History of the eighteenth century, defined the strawberry “a gift from God”, as well as for its tasty fragrance, also for its health properties deriving from the high content of phenolic compounds capable of exerting broad-spectrum antioxidant and protective effects on the human body. considered the prototype of foods prohibited for allergy sufferers, due to its high content of histamine, a substance capable of causing annoying reactions that can involve the respiratory and / or gastrointestinal system, or can more classically manifest themselves in the form of red and itchy wheals typical of urticaria. Next April 22 will be the strawberry, one of the most popular fruits of this season, versatile in the kitchen for its many applications. ni, the topic of Il Gusto della Salute, the scientific column conceived and coordinated by the immunologist Mauro Minelli, head of the Foundation for Personalized Medicine for Southern Italy. of the ADNKronos Group.